I have decided that one of my personal projects is going to be revisiting the thousands of posts we put into the private archive prior to launching our asset management firm and, to the extent reasonably possible, release them back to the public blog if we feel they might be useful from an academic, entertainment, and/or historical perspective. NOTE THAT THIS POST WILL BE FEATURED AT THE TOP OF THE BLOG HOMEPAGE WHILE THE PROJECT IS ON-GOING. NEW POSTS WILL APPEAR BEHIND IT UNTIL THEN.

If you ever wanted to try the infamous “New Coke” that resulted in global boycotts of Coca-Cola when it briefly replaced the classic formula, now is your chance. Of course, me being me, this post ended up turning into an academic discussion about long-term investing including a mini-case study of Coke over the past 34 years.

Sometime within the last week, Aaron and I were talking and he brought up a dish many of you will probably remember: Beef Stroganoff. We talked about how it seemed like nearly everyone raised in the 1980s and 1990s (at least in the Midwest) ate it regularly, often of the Hamburger Helper variety. It was ubiquitous, reaching worldwide popularity after emerging from Russia during the 19th century. You could not get away from this stuff – you ate it at home, you ate it when visiting family or friends, you at it at school, you ate it at church events.

My post about Disney earlier today made me realize I need to share with you my latest obsession: a board game called Villainous. If you have a cunning and ruthless side that enjoys plotting optimal strategy, buy it. You won’t regret it.

I’ve always been introspective. Over the past year, though, I find that I am spending more time examining my life so far; re-evaluating decisions, trying to gain additional insight from my experiences, and really being honest about what I want for the rest of the time I’ve been gifted. I think there several reasons for this.

As we’ve been taking walks through the parks and beaches of Southern California, different garden centers and nurseries such as Roger’s and Armstrong’s, I’ve been trying to catalog numerous flowers and plants that I might want to remember for future reference.

More than generation ago – all the way back in 1996 – the late Dr. Thomas J. Stanley released a book called The Millionaire Next Door that detailed how actual wealth accumulation differed from people’s incorrect assumptions. I think the formula for future generations of self-made millionaires will be slightly different.

In August of 2014, I wrote a post called Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. I penned it because, at the time, I was seeing a lot of situations in the media in which data was being used to push a political agenda on either the far right or the far left. I’m now seeing this same sort of deception in discussions about wealth inequality.

As many of you know, Elizabeth Warren has been getting a lot of press lately after proposing a wealth tax equal to 2.00% on fortunes above $50 million and 3.00% on fortunes above $1 billion. As an academic exercise, it’s useful to consider what that would mean for the United States.

In recent years, the United States Federal Government has found itself in the fortunate position of collecting more inflation-adjusted, real purchasing power tax revenue than it has during any other period of its 242 year history. For the government’s 2019 fiscal year, tax receipts at the Federal level are expected to balloon to an almost unfathomable $3.422 trillion.

As the top 20% and bottom 80% further divide, one of the things I’ve found interesting over the past few years is the difference in how both groups use something called the subjunctive mood in their speech and writing. The top 20% nearly always uses it correctly. I suspect it’s become a sort of subconscious signaling code without the people doing it even realizing what is happening.

I’ve been thinking about the next 25 to 50 years; mapping out plans for my personal life, my family, the firm, and, to some degree, certain societal changes that I think are important and worthy of significant political and financial investment. Part of this involves estate planning and how we think about leaving money to our future children.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you! I hope you and your family had a wonderful holiday! This year, Aaron and I did something we haven’t done since college: we didn’t cook or bake for Christmas, instead catering it so we could focus on work.

Despite living in Southern California for several months, and being only a short distance from the beach, Aaron and I had not, yet, taken the time to go stand in the ocean because of our work relocating the global asset management firm to the West Coast. We made a point to go do that today.

After writing about the incredible Roger’s Gardens in Corona del Mar, I thought it was only fair to point out that Aaron and I also enjoy a place called Armstrong’s Garden Center in Newport Beach. The business can trace its roots to 1889 and holds a storied place in the history of the global rose industry (and you know we love our roses!). A few months ago, we stopped in and spotted a Monarch Butterfly hanging out on some flowers. We took a video …

In Corona del Mar, California there is a place called Roger’s Gardens. It is one of the coolest businesses I’ve ever seen and within moments of walking through the entrance, Aaron and I knew it was going to be somewhere we spent a lot of time.

It is not an exaggeration to say that most of my life and career has been spent reading, writing, and thinking. In many cases, I turned around and taught others a synthesized version of what I absorbed, putting my own spin on it. My favorite place in the world during childhood was the public library and even now, I am typing this post surrounded by enormous bookcases overflowing with volumes on everything from trust fund structures to biographies of oil and banking titans. Reading allows me to satisfy a nearly insatiable curiosity about the world. More than any other behavior, it has been responsible for my success.

While there is still a lot to get done, our place in Newport Beach is coming along nicely. After returning from Missouri, where we had been for several weeks in order to continue our planned personal and professional relocation from the state, we finally stocked the kitchen and started cooking!

Today, we were in Newport Beach knocking some things off our task list. We haven’t had a chance to really explore anything in the surrounding area, nor do we expect to until at least a couple of months after we’ve completed the move as we need to execute it with speed and precision, but we did figure that we could take our lunch break to check out one of the local Korean restaurants. We settled on a place called Chan Chan Food House in nearby Irvine, California. We didn’t know what to expect but the food looked delicious and the reviews were good.

After years of planning, research, and comparative analysis, and extensive travel around the country, we have finally made a decision: Aaron and I are moving to Southern California. Here’s a glimpse into the thought process we used to make what is what one of the biggest decisions of our lives and careers.

One of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal in life and business is reflecting on your intention in taking a given action. Yet, despite its enormous benefits, few people stop to reflect on why they are behaving in a certain way.

Recently, Aaron and I sold all of our Mount Olympus Awards, LLC membership units as part of an intrafamily transaction that allowed us to divest both the operating assets and intellectual property related to the letterman jacket and letterman jacket award industries.

Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California, recently published a book called, “The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class”. It looks at how affluent and upper class individuals and families are now engaging in a different type of consumption that effectively strengthens their own advantages, making upward mobility more difficult for those who don’t understand the codes or values of the group.

It’s been roughly seven months since I’ve been present or active on the site in any meaningful sense. There are largely two reasons for this. Firstly, as you can probably imagine, nearly every waking moment of our lives has been consumed by the launch of our global asset management firm, Kennon-Green & Co. This included spending a couple of weeks in Southern California looking for office space.

In recent months, I’ve found myself reflecting upon what I consider to be one of the most important and moral documents written in the history of civilization, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. It comes up at the most unexpected of times; something in the back of my mind that makes…

Aaron and I love everything about Christmas – the Christmas decorations, the baking, the Christmas carols, picking out gifts for other people. It’s magical. No matter how busy we are, there will always be time for friends and family, holiday movies, and hot cocoa.

If life were like Civilization V, this is the point in which King Sejong the Great would be getting the message from President Obama, “My people are buying your blue jeans and listening to your music.” The Kennon-Green household has given into the 한류. First, though, we need to back up so you have some context.

Some things are noted for their rarity. The return of Halley’s comet. The Chicago Cubs winning the World Series. Joshua Kennon and Aaron Green buying a car. After years and years of discussing our search for our next car, the bargain we had been waiting for finally presented itself.

As many of you noticed, Aaron and I went radio silent more than a month ago. This was entirely due to the fact that we are spending nearly every waking moment in the final stages of establishing Kennon-Green & Co., the asset management firm that we hope to have open within the next sixty to ninety days if all goes as planned.

I’ve avoided speaking about the Brexit situation because I ultimately believe that it is not my place to tell British citizens how their country should be run even though I am a stakeholder in their success. While there are what I could consider extraordinarily high probabilities that the decision to leave the European Union will lead to lower GDP, the fact remains that GDP isn’t everything. Money, and the economy, exists to serve a civilization.

The quartet of financial independence is made up of cash flow, liquidity, profitability, and net worth. Each requires management and should not be neglected if you want to build lasting value for you and your family.

In life and in business, you have to know who you are, what you stand for, what you believe, and how you will proceed. Trying to be all things to all people is a recipe for disaster that leaves no one happy and sabotages your success.

Nestlé dividend day has come and gone for both the owners of the Swiss shares directly in Zurich and the holders of the ADR here in the United States. The board continued its tradition of hiking the dividend.

The word “franchise” is used to describe an arrangement in which one business, the franchisor, allows another business, the franchisee, to use its name, trademarks, trade secrets, intellectual property, branding, operating systems, and internal support resources in a specific geographic area, sometimes with an exclusivity provision that guarantees no other franchises will be granted within a specific buffer zone so the franchisees aren’t cannibalizing sales from each other, in exchange for some sort of payment.

Benjamin Graham once wisely observed that more money has been lost by investors “reaching for yield” than stolen at the barrel-end of a gun. During periods of anemic interest rates on fixed-income securities, bank deposits, and cash equivalents, a combination of impatience, action bias, and desperation causes savers to do what they would otherwise consider extraordinarily foolish.

Our Personal Project for 2016 – Addition Through Subtraction A few years ago, one of our projects involved focusing our pantry on the bare essentials; raw ingredients that could be used to make almost any recipe imaginable. At the time, I posted pictures of the early stages, which included different types of flour (bread flour,…

Although it may seem like I haven’t been around much lately, reality is far different. I’ve been quietly publishing more than I have in years, it’s just hidden. Kind of. As part of the upgrades to the Investing for Beginners site that are happening, I’m putting in quite a bit of time in the midst of everything else going on, often releasing 10,000+ words per month.

By now, you are no doubt aware that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away unexpectedly in his sleep. At 79 years old, in generally good health, and seemingly as sharp as ever, the news came out of nowhere.

Market Timing, Valuation, and Systematic Purchases I have a lot of work to do but I’m sitting at my desk, the snow is on the ground outside, I have a fresh cup of coffee in front of me, and I don’t really feel like diving into my task list quite yet. This is going to…

A Night of Delicious Korean Food at Sobahn in Kansas City My youngest sister flew back from the East Coast tonight after being out there for roughly three weeks. My parents, Aaron, and I met her at the airport and then went out to a place called Sobahn, a well-rated Korean restaurant in Kansas City.…

Almost five years ago, Tiffany & Company was glittering at time when much of the corporate world was still mired in misery from devastating losses and the implosion of Wall Street. Based on the annual report for the prior year, 2010, worldwide net sales had risen by 12% on a constant-exchange-rate basis, reaching $3,085,290,000. After-tax profits were up 39% from the year before, 2009, when the developed world had gone through the worst meltdown since the Great Depression, coming in at $368,403,000.

One of the things that worries me from a risk management perspective is investors who don’t know what they own or their actual, real portfolio weightings. Sometimes, I’ll hear new investors say, “I own stocks” or “I own mutual funds” but neither is an answer. Those aren’t the relevant details. The real question: “In which enterprises, on what terms, and at what price has the money been invested, laid out, and exchanged?”. Much of everything else is a smokescreen serving to obfuscate reality. It’s risk-adjusted reward we’re after; reward measured in after-tax, net-of-inflation real purchasing power.

Mail Bag: What Is Something That Is an Instant Deal Breaker for You? Joshua, What is a trait or behavior that is an instant deal breaker for you or that can cause you to reevaluate a person negatively? [Redacted] For better or worse, each of us is influenced to some degree by our childhoods. No…

One of the major themes running through my body of work, both on this site and at Investing for Beginners, can be summed up in the statement, “Know your risks”. I hammer it home all the time; “risk-adjusted return”, talk about remote-probability events, explaining how much of wealth building is learning to “tilt probabilities in [your] favor”, admonishment to never invest in something you don’t fully understand and couldn’t explain to a Kindergartener in a couple of sentences. Consider this real-life tragedy a morality tale that can help you protect your own family.

Those of you who wish to read my writing at Investing for Beginners can now navigate my body of work much more easily thanks to a directory I built over the past week. It’s a productive copy for my own internal use as part of a planned upgrade project I’ll be doing in the coming year (as such, it…

Throughout your life and career, you are going to face many situations in which you are dissatisfied. Often, these situations will arise because of legitimate grievances you have about a person, behavior, policy, or system. There are a few strategies that, used judiciously, can exponentially increase your effectiveness.

After making the rum raisin ice cream recipe, we decided to try our hands at a white chocolate ice cream recipe, which used whole eggs (rather than egg yolks), a 1/3rd increase in the heavy-cream-to-whole-milk ratio, left out the brown sugar, granulated sugar, and salt, and a few other tweaks in terms of the order in which the ingredients were assembled.

I’m not sure what it was but a few nights ago, I had an overwhelming urge to begin planning our meals for the next two months, a big part of which I wanted to feature older recipes that don’t get their due. This autumn and winter, we’re going to cook like it’s 1700 – 1950; Shepard’s pie, German Christmas cakes, Yorkshire pudding, perhaps an Apple Dowdy from Colonial America. I want to go back and make things that get most of their flavor profile extracted from a handful of key ingredients; fruits, nuts, meats, liqueurs, or spices. Rum raisin ice cream was on that list.

It’s time for our annual review of the blog community demographics! Actually, I hadn’t realized it since we’re busy launching the global asset management firm but a few of you sent me messages asking where it was so I wanted to take some time out to get the latest numbers up for you. The short version: Continuing the usual trend of winning, it will likely surprise no one that, since last year, you’ve managed to grow a bit older, mostly richer, and better educated. When people talk about the top of the socioeconomic bell curve, they are speaking about many of you. This community is extraordinary.

One of the major lessons I’ve tried to teach is that building your net worth comes down to two levers: Cash in and cash out. That’s it. That is the entirety of the game when you peer past the distractions and gaze into the heart of the mathematical reality. From a financial perspective, every action you take for your career or business ultimately only matters in so much as it someday serves to exert force on one of those levers so that more cash is flowing in than is flowing out, leaving a surplus. It sounds so simple but when you see things through the focus of this particular lens, you can more quickly identify the actions that are likely to have an outsized effect, both for good or bad, on net worth.

I did not realize I needed a miniature Boeing 747 in my life but I now know that I do. I could get it painted with the UPS logo for the investing cabinet which, I suppose, would need to be renamed the investing hangar. (Aaron and I don’t hold any meaningful stake in United Parcel…

I am a huge fan of the work of biographer Ron Chernow (many of you know him for writing Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr., which is the best biography on the oil giant that has ever been published). Back in 2004, he wrote a biography of Alexander Hamilton. If you don’t have a copy, you should buy one and read it. My edition is marked-up, highlighted, cross-referenced, and scribbled upon. Through 800 or so pages, he lays out the story of one of America’s founding fathers.

While I picked up some shares of Johnson & Johnson stock for one of our personal accounts today and worked on the launch of the global asset management business, Aaron decided to make a stuffed pepper recipe he told me last night he wanted to try. I’m so glad he did because they are incredible. You need to make them yourself.

A few of you have expressed interest in the behind-the-scenes process of launching the global asset management business Aaron and I are establishing to provide a mechanism to take on outside funds alongside our own; a natural extension of what we’ve been doing for so many years privately…

Johnson & Johnson is one of the most successful businesses in global history but its rise to preeminence resulted in an ugly family battle that left a wake of victims behind the misbehavior of two deeply flawed brothers.

After writing the post on investing in the oil majors (if you can call it that – I’m genuinely sorry about reaching almost 6,100 words as I didn’t plan on making it so lengthy) – explaining how you’re being paid to absorb volatility over very long periods of time that other people don’t want on their…

I’ve received a significant number of requests over the past few months asking that I discuss what is happening with oil, natural gas, pipeline, and refining companies; to explain how I look at the situation and the sorts of things Aaron and I discuss when we’re allocating our own capital or the capital of those who have entrusted their assets to us. It’s a big topic with a lot of niche considerations but I want to take some time today to address the oil majors; the handful of mega-capitalization behemoths such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, ConocoPhillips / Phillips 66, and BP.

My brother’s white coat ceremony for medical school was this past Saturday! We went to cheer him on as he was assigned to his docent, with the internal medicine experience up first. (Though he’s part of the class of 2019, I think he’s graduating in 2018 because of however his particular academic experience and credit history happened to coalesce. I’m not entirely clear on how the mechanics work. Whatever it is, it won’t be long before we’re calling him “Dr. Kennon”.)

I spent all day working on the new business we’re launching, trying to figure out the pricing structure I want to use and the cut-offs I want to enforce before we get ready to file the regulatory paperwork, while Aaron oversaw the re-platforming of the sporting goods company. We came together around dinner time to…

On a recent late-night restocking run to the store, Aaron and I were walking down an aisle when we suddenly spotted something that, outside of a handful of enclaves, has been missing in action or relegated to back corners for decades: A product called Noxzema. For almost three-quarters of a century, the stuff was ubiquitous, found in nearly every home and an absolute must-have on any shopping trip taken by nearly any American family. The business story behind the Noxema fortune is a fascinating one.

I’ve publicly written many times about my extreme discomfort with the direction of certain technological innovations; how, left unchecked without explicit guarantees of privacy, they could lead to what one Supreme Court justice described as a turn-key totalitarian state. In the wrong hands, there would be nowhere to run, no place to hide. It’s not…

I’ve been thinking about the story that has captivated the country over the past two days – how, if various news reports are to be believed, Dr. Walter J. Palmer of Eden Prairie, Minnesota, owner of a practice called River Bluff Dental in Bloomington, Minnesota, and two of his guides poached the beloved Cecil the Lion from a national park in Zimbabwe, luring him from the sanctuary where he was protected, injuring him with an arrow before tracking him for two days, shooting him, beheading him, skinning him, and leaving the body behind with plans to mount the trophy in his office.

I’ve been thinking a lot about freedom of speech, and the first amendment in general, lately. Between the uproar over the Confederate Battle Flag, an unprecedented user and moderator revolt at Reddit after the decision to shut down certain groups (the CEO, whom many blame for the ugly affair, wrote an op-ed piece in The Washington Post), a very vocal minority of Americans upset about the Supreme Court granting equality to gay Americans in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision, and world-class comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock publicly airing their concern about the sanitation of humor for fear of offending people, talk shows, newspapers, radio programs, books, and blogs have all been discussing the limits of personal expression to which an American is entitled under our constitution.

You may already know the Census Bureau data shows there are 115,610,216 households in the United States and, that, as per the Federal Reserve data, roughly 1 out of every 5 of these households earns $100,000 or more per year; that 1 out of every 25 of them has a net worth of $1,000,000 or more. What about substantial wealth excluding houses, cars, furniture, jewelry … actual investment portfolios stuffed with cash, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate investment trusts, master limited partnerships, tax-lien certificates, or any of the other numerous securities one can own to compound capital?

Back in 2011, I did a 20-year case study of Colgate-Palmolive. Global events have conspired in such a way that it can now serve as a perfect illustration of a valuation conundrum: While not cheap, Colgate-Palmolive is significantly cheaper for a long-term owner than the price-to-earnings ratio alone would have you believe. In fact, despite having what appears to be a 26.54 p/e ratio, it’s slightly undervalued to its private market value could you get your hands on the entire empire. It’s a rare thing to be able to talk about a gem like this under conditions such as these so I’m not going to let the opportunity pass. Dust off your powdered wigs, take out your walking cane, and travel back with me to post-Revolutionary America.

It would be a serious mistake in judgment to think of Dolly Parton as merely a singer and actress. She is much more. Over the past 50 years, she has become one of the most adept investors in the world, with a portfolio of operating assets spanning everything from theme parks and hotels to media production…

Marriage Equality Declared a Fundamental, Constitutional Right: My Personal Reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges It’s been almost a week since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges declaring marriage equality a fundamental right under both the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution. I’ve…

On August 9th, 1995, the company behind Internet browser Netscape went public, skyrocketing as people fought to get a piece of the so-called “new economy”. It set off a buying panic among the public that lasted five years; otherwise rational men and women convinced that this time really was different, the mania feeding on itself. Anything and…

It is January 15th, 1919. You’re in Boston, Massachusetts shortly before lunchtime. Sitting at 529 Commercial Street is a three-year old tanker owned by the Purity Distilling Company, a subsidiary of United States Industrial Alcohol. At 50 feet high, housed within the steel body of this five-story behemoth is 26,000,000 pounds of sticky, sweet molasses; one of the most popular sweeteners…

Here’s What Happened While I Was Away … With so much of my time spent away from the site in the past 4-6 weeks, I thought I’d give a “here’s roughly what’s been going on” round-up. I had intended for a lot of this to turn into their own stand-alone posts but this will be faster.…

As time passes, ideas that were once unthinkable become mainstream. From racial equality to marriage equality, equal rights for women to voting rights for non-landowners, what issue do you think will be considered with abject horror in the future that we think commonplace today?

After we said goodbye to Jimmy last night, we made plans to meet up again today for our final full day in Chicago. There was no real plan other than shopping on Michigan Avenue and getting a feel for Chicago. We were going to do a boat tour but the weather was too brutal. Next…

Eataly in Downtown Chicago Should Be Your New Italian Grocery Store After hours browsing the Thorne miniatures and the paintings, sculptures, and pottery at the Art Institute of Chicago, we were hungry. Jimmy wanted us to see a grocery store he thought we’d love called Eataly. He was right. This place is everything a grocery store…

Remember back in 2012 when Jimmy came on one of his regular house guest trips to visit Aaron and me in Kansas City? The time when we went to the Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art? Today, he took us to the Art Institute of Chicago. You already experienced the incredible Thorne miniatures installment in another post,…

Narcissa Niblack Thorne was born in 1882. She fell in love with her childhood sweetheart, James Ward, and they married. He was the heir to the Montgomery Ward fortune, one of the biggest in the world at the time thanks to a chain of department stores that were once as ubiquitous as Target or J.C. Penney. A graduate of art school, the Chicago socialite wasn’t content to sit around and make small talk all of her life. She began designing and orchestrating these incredible one-foot-to-one-inch scale historical replicas of different architectural, interior design, and furniture styles throughout history to serve as models of how homes and spaces had changed over the years. She was meticulous and insisted upon accuracy (e.g., the wood, down to the grain direction, of the tiny furniture had to be made in exactly the same way as the model piece upon which it was based.)

Aaron and I arrived in Chicago less than two hours ago and are spending the weekend visiting our friend Jimmy from college. We had promised to come up for awhile and he wanted to show us the city. We’re having dinner at an Italian restaurant called Tocco in the Wicker Park district. [mainbodyad] Afterward, we…

Surveying the most recent ten year period, the increase in Berkshire Hathaway’s economic engine has been breathtaking. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 gave it the opportunity to lay out billions upon billions of dollars in cash it had been storing for years prior at terms that were unlike any deals we’ve seen in decades. Convertible preferred stocks, warrants, private buyouts … the firm got its on hands highly lucrative securities, many of which were privately negotiated and offered return enhancers not available to average investors …

Shortly after Blue Fairy gives life to the eponymous wooden puppet in the 1940 classic animated film Pinocchio, she instructs him that he must, “Always let [his] conscience be [his] guide”. Were she a rationalist, she might have added an important addendum: “And make decisions based upon objective, high-quality, third-party-recorded data to remove your own bias as much as possible…

There is an old joke that goes something like this… Not so long ago there was a watermelon farmer. In June, during peak watermelon season, he began to notice that someone was stealing his fruit. Slowly, but steadily, melons would disappear, along with it his profits. He tried everything until one particularly fine morning, he had an idea.…

Now that the dividend has been paid on the Swiss shares (April 22nd), the stockholder meeting concluded (April 16th), and Citibank is working with the Swiss Tax Authorities to distribute all of those beautiful Swiss Francs shipped over from Vevey to the United States for holders of the ADR to receive their U.S. dollar equivalent payouts later this month on May 29th when the process has completed (can you believe it’s already been a year since the last time we had this conversation?), I wanted to write about Nestlé.

With the site currently under re-design, I haven’t had time to post much content on top of my regular responsibilities. We were making dinner and decided to take some pictures so I could test out one of the features of the new theme, which involves dynamically creating an interactive gallery that I can format in…

I’m going to regret that title tomorrow. I know it. Two of the books I’ve been meaning to delve into sometime this year are about evolutionary biology; how the incentives that lead to reproductive and social success (which itself is a facilitator of reproductive success) shape everything from our government institutions to the popularity of…

After writing about using words to your advantage in life and business, I began thinking of one of my all-time favorite mental models. It comes from legendary marketing psychologist Clotaire Rapaille, who wrote about it in his treatise “The Culture Code“. Before we get into that, let me say that Dr. Clotaire Rapaille caught my attention so…

Words and phrases are interesting things. Each represents a package of ideas and associations, instantly unwrapped the moment we encounter them. If I say, “She stood in a cold, dark, damp basement on a winter day, with only a bit of gray, overcast sky visible through small windows around the perimeter; the rhythm of ice rain hitting…

I get a lot of requests for real-world examples or homework assignments that have to do with some of the more important investing concepts. This morning is your lucky day if you’re fairly new to the finance game and want to give diving into SEC filings or annual reports a try. Here’s a (fairly) easy introduction to how things can appear better, or worse, than they really are. Ready? Let’s go.

When I posted the butternut squash soup with cinnamon sugar crouton recipe I wanted to try after a friend of ours made herself a pot back on Captiva Island, I mentioned in one of the photo captions that our cutting board was on the verge of giving up the ghost after years of faithful service. …

Get ready to add yet another secret millionaire to your case study files. Ronald Read passed away last June at 92 years old. The Brattleboro, Vermont man, who had no college education and drove a Toyota Yaris, always made a point of living below his means. He spent many years working as a gas station attendant and…

I would argue, strongly, that an abundance of evidence shows the typical investors grossly misunderstand the mathematics of diversification and the role it can play in a well-constructed portfolio. Allow me to walk you through some examples that might provide further insight to how you should be thinking about the concept.

Butternut Squash Soup with Cinnamon Sugar Croutons When we were down in Florida, our friend, Karen, had some butternut squash puree in the refrigerator the chef, Sebastian, had left for her and Blake as he didn’t need it. She used it to make herself a butternut squash soup for lunch one day after coming back…

Over the past couple of decades, quiet, subtle, barely-noticed changes in the methodology of the S&P 500 have resulted in the index barely resembling the one that produced the historical returns investors now seem to implicitly assume they will earn in the future.

When Aaron and I were at the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta, we thought about buying our niece and nephews some gifts from the retail store but ultimately decided to give them something more valuable: Stock. We’ll make another transfer to the custodianships I setup last year, modeled partly after the one we established for my youngest sister more than a decade ago.

It is absolutely nuts to me to see this clip of Warren Buffett that was discovered. In it, he was just shy of 32 years old, roughly the same age I am now. He was completely unknown outside a tiny circle of people, though rich, wasn’t one of the richest men in the country (let alone…

On the way back from spending the week with friends, Blake and Karen, on Captiva Island, we decided to take a detour to meet up with two other old friends we don’t get to see very often, who happened to be at Walt Disney World. We were heading toward Tampa and re-routing to Orlando would only a…

After we visited The World of Coke at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, we traveled another 600 miles to Captiva, an island off the coast of Florida where we’ll be staying for the rest of the week. Our friends Karen and Blake got married – you met them years ago when we had dinner at…

We woke up in Atlanta, Georgia this morning and decided to go to one of the most sacred spots in the entire Western Hemisphere: The World of Coca-Cola. What might appear as a mere beverage to some is practically a cult in the South. Coke reigns over this city like royalty thanks to the fact…

President Obama’s administration has announced that he wants to impose a one-time tax levy of up to 14% on the $2 trillion in foreign profits American companies have built up and not repatriated in exchange for making repatriation on future foreign profits that were subject to at least a 19% tax rate tax-free, encouraging domestic…

If you need something to brighten up your day (or make you feel despondent depending on how you look at it), this is living proof that all you have to do to be successful in life is give people what they want at a price that is higher than the cost it takes you to deliver it to them, with sufficient margins for risk, capital tie-up, and opportunity cost. You can literally fail 3rd grade science and, if you satisfy a want, make six, seven, or even eight figures a year. The system we have now forgives a lot of shortcomings if you prove useful in other areas.

Back when Dave Thomas left his discipleship of Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken fame to go off and start the hamburger chain that we now know as Wendy’s (which he named for his daughter, Melinda) one of my favorite things he did was find a way to reduce waste – and thus costs –…

We’ve had fun over the years answering the question, “How much money does it take to be in the top 1%?” and even looked at the breakdown of how the top 1%, as a class, generates its money. If you enjoyed those posts, hold on to your seat because there is a new report out that…

By now, all of you know what happened recently with the Swiss Franc, Euro, and, as an extension, the price change of Nestlé shares in the United States. It caused a stream of messages to come in through the contact form like I haven’t seen in a long time, all with the same theme. Here…

When I became obsessed with investing as a child, convinced it offered me the greatest probability of escaping what I saw as an economic dead end due to the community in which I lived, I spent years reading everything I could about any and every event tied to the financial markets and those who shaped…

The average healthy adult should eat roughly 2,000 calories per day to maintain a recommended weight. In the United States, all else equal, the average male, at 5’8″, should weigh between 140 pounds and 172 pounds. The average female, at 5’4″, should weigh between 114 pounds and 151 pounds. In study after study, the typical person underestimates…

It’s always odd to try and fit your life story into a few lines but here is the short version: My name is Joshua Kennon. I’m 36 years old. My husband, Aaron, and I met and fell in love as teenagers. Neither of us ever even dated anyone else – we knew we were going to spend the rest of our lives together. After graduating from high school, we moved from the Midwest to the East Coast where we studied classical music and a wide range of liberal arts.

Later, we returned to the Kansas City area to be near family. During this period, which spanned nearly thirteen years and lasted from our early twenties into our mid-thirties, we started several Internet companies and spent much of our time semi-retired, managing our own wealth thanks to the financial independence those businesses helped us achieve. I also wrote a lot during those years. In fact, the odds are good that you’ve directly or indirectly encountered me many times without realizing it. For nearly 17 years, I was the Investing for Beginners Expert at what was then known as About.com. I am the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Investing, 3rd Edition.

These days, we spend our time running and growing the firm, as we plan on it being the institution through which we pass on our own family’s wealth to our future children and grandchildren. The experience, particularly meeting such incredible people, has been one of the most rewarding of our lives. It’s a rare thing to have a career that allows you to not only do what you love for a living, but to do it with people you admire, respect, and like. We feel like two of the most blessed guys in the world.

This personal blog is a place where I talk about some of the things that interest me – cooking, finance, entrepreneurship, politics, history, economics. I’m really proud of the community we’ve built, in no small part because the typical reader around here is exceptional. Please note that in preparation of the launch of the asset management business, and to better protect our family’s privacy, Aaron and I removed thousands of articles, posts, and comments from this blog, reducing it to a fraction of its former size. This means if you are looking for something that existed prior to us coming out of retirement, the odds are good it simply isn’t available anymore.

Important Information and Disclaimers

IMPORTANT LEGAL INFORMATION: This is a personal blog intended for academic, educational, and social engagement among members of a like-minded community. Nothing on this site is intended or should be construed as investment advice, financial advice, tax advice, or legal advice. You are solely responsible for your own financial decisions, agree that you will seek the advice of your own qualified professional advisors, agree that you, and you alone, are solely responsible for any financial consequences or losses as a result of your actions, and use of the site constitutes your agreement that you will not rely upon any information found on the site, including the comments. All text, images, and resources are provided on an “as is” basis with no guarantee of accuracy and with no obligation to update or correct information. For more information, read the terms and conditions. Copyright Joshua Kennon. All Rights Reserved.